This week on the Podcast for Cultural Reformation, we are going to talk about thinking Christianly about apologetics. Welcome back to the Podcast for Cultural Reformation. I'm your host to today, Pastor Nate Wright, and I'm joined as I most often am by my colleagues, Dr. Michael Tisen and Dr. Joe Boote, good to see both of you gentlemen today. How are we? Doing very well, thanks Nate. Just got back from a 10-day North American trip on Sunday actually, but I'm back in the time zone. I seem to cope with it very well these days, so no problem. But yeah, been a good couple of weeks. We were, I think, the last podcast we were recording from Tennessee together last week. Yeah, that's right. And Joe spent some time north of the border with me. We did some some fundraising and you're visiting some of our partner churches and then down there with Michael recording for our next foundations curriculum, which is we're really excited about. Michael, how are things going for you in beautiful? You can see the snow behind me in in the background. How is it in the promised land down in Kentucky? Well, we got quite a little cold snap here for two days, so I actually have a skiff of snow on the ground. We almost decided not to go out to the gym this morning because we were scared. But everything's good. And Joe and I got to spend some time in Tennessee at a conference with a number of churches just in the Knoxville area in Maryville. And that was a great opportunity to build relationships. And I think the people who attended the conference were greatly encouraged. So good time had by all. It's good to have Joe back over the pond now. Give us some distance between each other and other than that, we're all good. Absence makes the heart grow finder. Does it Michael? So we've been the heart rate go down. It's the prefers he doesn't like the close accountability Nate's what it is. Cheers. I can acknowledge that. Well, if you've been following the podcast for the last little while, we've been working through think Christianly and we've been talking a little bit about Joe's most recent work. Think Christianly last week we talked about theonomy and thinking Christianly about God's law. What we'd like to talk about today is a very important aspect of Christian thought and thinking and evangelism. And that is the the idea of apologetics. So apologetics simply means the defense of the faith, the kind of magna carda of the apologetics. Scripturally speaking, we think about first Peter three. I'll start in verse 13, but it's really verses 15 and 16 that we're getting to where Peter says, now who is there to harm you if you're as jealous to do what is good. But even if you should suffer for righteousness's sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them nor be troubled. But in your hearts honor Christ, the Lord is holy. Always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. You do it with gentleness and with respect. So this is sort of the main verse where we often get to this area of Christian study that we call apologetics. And it comes right there where Peter says that we always ought to be ready to give a defense. And that's where the term comes from apologetics comes from Apologia to make a defense. And so we're going to talk about that a little bit today. And what we want to talk about essentially is that oftentimes in Christian circles, the idea of being able to defend your faith against accusations or counter arguments from the culture really has to do with giving people a defense of the existence of God. It has to do with kind of mounting your evidence for Christianity and for the existence of God against their mountain of evidence against. And we kind of want to dig a little bit deeper and talk about how Christian apologetics isn't really about evidentially trying to prove the existence of God. Apologetics actually starts where that verse in First Peter starts in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. And it actually begins with the presupposition that the Christian worldview is true. And it bursts out from there. So Joe, why don't I kick this over to you to start with because I think let's first dispel the myth that most Christians think in terms of defining apologetics as a sort of appeal to human reason to try to get people in their minds to be able to reasonably come to a belief in God. Yeah, well, I think you've set it up quite nicely for us. The charge that Peter gives us is that we are to if we're going to engage in a defense of the faith. So Paul actually says elsewhere that his ministry existed for the defense and confirmation of the good news. And if we're going to be able to do that as believers, we have to start by setting apart Christ as Lord in our hearts. And of course, as we've explained often on the show, the heart is the root unity of the human person in in scripture. It isn't your emotions as such or the certainly not the organ pumping blood around your body, but it is the root of your being set apart Christ as Lord in the root of your being. So for all of your thinking, feeling doing and being Christ is Lord. And from there, always be ready to defend to give a reason for the hope that is within you and do this with gentleness and with respect, keeping it clear conscience. So the starting point is Christ's Lordship. And the assumption is that if you are if you've set apart Christ as Lord in your heart, then you are ready to give a defense to those that ask you for a reason for the hope that's in you. And that means of course, this applies to every Christian because the hope that is within you whilst it's centered in the same person of CS Lewis or Francis Schaefer or Cornelius Van Tille or Hermann Deuiverd, most people aren't going to defend the faith the way that Cornelius Van Tille was and was able to with the gifts that God had given him. But we can we can set apart Christ as Lord in our hearts and give a defense for the hope that is in us along the same lines where Christ's Lordship is first and foremost. So I think obviously there's so much that can be said about this, but the the working assumption as you said that many people have about apologetics is that it is a kind of Christian in Jitsu sort of discipline. And if you're going to engage in it, you have to be expert at least in a number of rationalistic or evidential fields of evidences and arguments. And that if you can master some of those, then you can encounter people in the apologetic encounter and then you can overcome their moves with more sophisticated or more learned moves because we're just sort of arguing about you know facts and if you can basically if you can basically be more intelligent than your opponent, then with your use of the tools, then you will be victorious in the in the argument and that somehow is the goal of Christian apologetics. The we're just arguing about the facts that are out there. And by piling as you put it sort of one argument on another, I think Vantil called it the block house method that finally you can just show by the sheer weight of your intellectual acumen and argumentation that the your arguments are more on the side of so called reason, whereas actually scripture would lead us to believe that the very foundation and basis of all human understanding, all human reasoning, all the laws that govern human thought, etc. are rooted in God himself. They presuppose who God is will come to some of this a bit later as we talk about strategy and apologetics. And that actually the Christians task in a certain sense, it's you know when when the the three of us are together an event and we're also when we're sat in a room together and somebody comes in and says where's Nate but Nate is sat next to me. I don't have to prove directly the existence of Nate in some rationalistic sense, right? I mean he's he's there in the room. And for the Christian, what what Peter is really communicating here is that you know God is present, he's with us, where is people? We know from the word of God that the reality of God's presence and existence and being is clearly seen but that truth is actually being suppressed in unrighteousness. And really our task is to really tear away man's hiding places so that he stands confronted with the living God. And as we do that, we're doing that with gentleness and with respect. So people will come with a variety, Peter assumes will come with a variety of different challenges, different questions. Because of the suppression of the truth, those questions will often be actually in order to misdirect us. And and to hide man loves to erect arguments to hide himself from God. I mean the basic premise of scripture is that man since the fall, since the first sin has been trying to hide from God and we take God's sides, God's side and we tear down all of his hiding places when we faithfully explain and defend the face. And we can't do that if somehow we are our allegiance is to some other Lord or partially to some other Lord. I mean if our other Lord or if our Lord is reason or so called science or philosophy, if we have a Lord that is somewhere else located somewhere else, then we actually can't engage in this task faithfully. So I hope hopefully that at least puts Christians, all Christians listening to this into a place to understand that explaining and defending the Christian faith, Peter says is a task for everyone. It's that there may be people who are called as, you know, evangelists who specialize in this field and are called to do public debates and that's all that sort of thing, you know, which I've spent many years doing, I still do them. My most recent debate was with a Muslim in a college here in the United Kingdom. That's not we're not saying that's everybody's calling, but Peter is saying that we can all of us set apart Christ as Lord and be ready, be fit. That Greek would be ready, literally means to be fit to give it to be enabled and ready to give that defense when those questions, those challenges actually come to us. We're enabled to give an answer. None of us would expect to show up at the Winter Olympics that we've just had and compete in the speed skating if we'd never put on a pair of skates before or you know, we occasionally potted around on a Sunday afternoon or a Saturday afternoon at the skating rink with the kids. If you're going to compete, you have to get fit. And so literally, Peter is saying, you know, get fit, be ready so that when those moments of opportunity come for you to explain and defend and talk about the hope that's in you, you can do that and do it with a with gentlest, do it with respect, keeping your conscience clear. That's a mandate for all of us. It's what it isn't is let's get Marshall all the arguments we can and bring them before the bar of human reason in competition with somebody else who's bringing theirs before the bar of human reason and see you can argue the other person down most effectively like it's some sort of Christian mixed martial arts. Well, and I think it's relevant that, you know, this this Magna Carta of Christian apologetics verse comes from the pen of Peter and not the pen of Paul, right? Paul is the the one who is educated and and kind of the intellectual giant of his day, but Peter is the simple fisherman and it's him who says that we have to be ready to give a defense. And Michael, it might be one thing for you know, Joe to say that. Joe has spent, you know, years on stage answering the toughest questions and some of the harshest arenas out there. But for guys like you and I who aren't the intellectual specialists that Joe is like, you know, you and I probably relate a little bit more to to Peter than we do to Paul. But, you know, Joe just made the argument that Christian apologetics isn't about winning arguments. But why is it that Christians are so tempted to fall into the ditch of just wanting to win arguments? Why is that a temptation for Christians as we enter the realm of apologetics to get caught up in this just fascination with winning arguments? I think it's an important question, Nate, because because it seems to be the pit we fall in so often. And I probably would have two answers to this. The first answer would be, it is it's something that we all aspire to. So, you know, when you and I are at a conference with Joe or when we're on the podcast and Joe, this is something God has gifted you with, you know, retaining information, being able to respond fairly instantaneously with, you know, a fairly specific quote or whatnot. You know, I get this feeling when I watch Charlie Kirk, right? I've been listening to a few of his clips again in the last little bit and you know, he'll get into an argument with somebody and they are just clearly avoiding any type of specific question or answering any type of specific reference to history. And we appreciate it when someone is able to be to intelligently answer falsehood. So when someone makes a false claim to be able to quickly recall, no, that's not what happened historically or no, that's not what the Bible says or no, that's not what that philosophical presumption, presupposition means or, you know, whichever area we go into, it's something to aspire to. So I think number one, one of the reasons why we're tempted to do this is because we all should be careful studyers and we should be those who can handle questions. And when someone's doing it really well, we go, oh, I aspire to that. And so I think that's a, I think that's a positive thing, you know, people like Joe and people like Charlie Kirk and other people who really hold together facts and are careful with their explanation of it. That's something to aspire to. But the biggest reason, and I think the most dangerous reason we're tempted to do this is actually because we've subtly believed that rationalism is what apologetics is. And so, so I actually remember the first time Joe gave a lecture at one of our world view academies where we started to delve into this at a deeper level. And it was so helpful when we started talking about, you know, apologetics like tackling idols because really the reason why we're tempted to make an argument for God is because we don't want to be the dumb fisherman with God's word in our hand saying, but what about Jesus? It seems so infantile when actually it is infantile. We're told to have faith like children. So it, it, we're tempted to, you know, chase pride. We're, we're tempted to chase something where it feels more credible to the world when in fact, that is the undermining of a faithful response. We're supposed to respond by faith, not respond by our own prideful or comprehensive or I want to say selfish reason, but or selfish answer, but that's not quite the word. But that's that the temptation is, you know, to depend on our, on our own understanding. And literally scripture teaches us not to lean on our own understanding. So that's the temptation. Yeah, that's good. Joe, I had, I had two questions, but just for the sake of time, I'm going to blend them into one question because you'll probably answer the second one if I only asked the first one anyway. So obviously one thing we talk about a lot on this program is sort of the myth of neutrality. And, and so in your book, you talk a little bit about how the fact there's no view from nowhere, right? We're tempted sometimes in this, in this arena of apologetics to fall into an atheistic argument that would say to us, well, I'm the, I'm the neutral observer who's just looking at the facts. You're the one with the religious presuppositions, but I'm just looking at the facts. So maybe explain a little bit why there, there is no view from nowhere. And oftentimes when we as Christians fall into that trap, right? We're actually, if we make apologetics merely trying to, you know, make Christianity plausible to the fallen autonomous reason, we're actually conceding too much already to the unbeliever. Well, let's start with the second one really quickly. I think it was Kierkegaard who pointed out that if at that moment, the apologist succeeds in making Christianity plausible to the unbeliever at that moment, he overthrows Christianity. And the point he was trying to make there was that when you think about the central claims of the Christian faith that the eternal God was made manifest as a human being in time, that the living God was born of a virgin, that the living God died, was raised to life again. What is it about those claims that from the unbelieving mindset is plausible? The fact and meaning are dependent on one another. In other words, they fact and meaning relate to one another inside of a worldview. So the claims of Christianity make sense. The claims of Christ make absolute sense. And the facticity of the Christian faith hangs together in a beautiful coherent within a Christian world and life view. Outside of a Christian world and life, you've got a Buddhist worldview, for example, or if you've got an atheistic worldview, in what sense is Christianity plausible? The assumptions of those worldviews mean that no, that's why some of the atheist philosophers will say, there isn't any evidence that would lead me to, but there's no possibility of offering me any historical or physical evidence that would make me believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Because there will view already denies the possibility of the infinite eternal God becoming man and acting in this way within history. So you'll have ridiculous claims like, well, maybe if suddenly I saw a, I read these claims by atheist philosophers, if suddenly a man with a great white beard peered out of the clouds and spoke to me and said, you, you unbelieve, then I would believe. This is all complete nonsense. In fact, we see that in the Bible, even miracles did not, the plot to kill Jesus was hardened when after Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead and they'd seen that miracle. So that's that is not the root issue. So no, we can't make Christianity plausible to the unbelieving mind. It's the work of the Holy Spirit who takes our arguments, which are in alignment with God's truth in all, in the heart of man, in creation, in every aspect of life and convinces that person in their being of the truth of the Cames of Price. It's a total paradigm shift in other words. You can't make the Cames of Christianity plausible inside of the world view of somebody else. And that brings us to the to the second, to your first question, which is, there's no view from nowhere. And one of the few realizations of modern philosophy has been that there is no view from nowhere. That facts and theory are interrelated to one another. If you're claiming facts, you're already interpreting them in terms of a meaning framework. And as I think it was popper pointed out the philosopher of science, he said, it's an impossible demand to ask that all assumptions, all arguments, he says, given that all arguments are based on assumptions, it is impossible that all assumptions should be based on arguments. So all arguments are presupposing something. So you can't insist that everything that's presupposed be based on another argument. Otherwise, you've just got an infinite regression. You have to start somewhere. And so that's what we mean by there's no such thing as a view from nowhere. Everybody has a starting point from which to begin. You can't stand on nothing. And a lot of people are trying to critique the Christian faith and sometimes even defend the Christian faith floating in mid-air without actually a foundation. Yeah, that's good. So as we kind of wrap up this first of our three conversations on apologetics, essentially the takeaway for our listeners here is, is we have to get out of the mindset that we're looking for specialists who can defend the Christian faith. The instruction to Peter is an instruction for every Christian. And that is that you have to be ready to give a hope for the defense for the hope that is in you. And so apologetics is primarily rooted in setting apart Christ's Lord, being actually rooted in your own understanding of who Christ is and what scripture objectively says about him, rather than assuming first and foremost, it's about changing unbelievers' minds to believe the evidence that you can present them. It's about knowing who Christ is yourself and then actually living out a faithful life that gives that defense. So this is not separated from the character of the person giving the defense. It's not separate from the beliefs of the person giving the defense that you actually are. You become a witness to the gospel when you set apart Christ as Lord and you are ready to give people a defense for the hope that is in you. This episode of the podcast for Cultural Reformation is brought to you by the Ezra Foundations Curriculum. The Ezra Foundations Curriculum equips churches, small groups, and Christian educators with a clear biblical worldview for all of life rooted in scripture and aligned with the theology of the Ezra Institute. It's designed to help participants think Christianly about family, education, politics, culture, and more. Each Curriculum kit includes full access to the Ezra Foundations video courses featuring Dr. Joe Boot, Pastor Nate Wright, and Dr. Michael Tiesen, along with 10 printed participant guides and a comprehensive leaders guide for group facilitation. Learn more and get started today at EzraMedia.tv slash Foundations. Now back to the show. We want to take another running start at this idea of Christian apologetics because we want to talk a little bit about the collapse of the Christian mind. Obviously your work, Joe, think Christianly is about the recovery of the Christian mind. And a lot of times when we're thinking about defending the faith, the tools that we have at our disposal to actually defend the Christian faith are inadequate because we've lost the Christian mind. So we want to kind of show that the deepest apologetic crisis in the modern west is actually the erosion of a comprehensive Christian worldview both in the culture and in the church as well. Now I want to start maybe Joe, you just said this when we were at the fundraiser last week and I thought it was really, I heard several people talk about how helpful it was for you to describe the cultural shift. When you started in apologetics 20 years ago, the arguments were a little bit different. Talk a little bit about that cultural shift and why it actually led to the emphasis there as a institute now has on Christian worldview. Yeah, that's a good thing to discuss actually because I do think it's a helpful landing point. Let me give an illustration from scripture that can help us as well. In Acts chapter two, the Apostle Peter is defending the gospel. He's being challenged as today of Pentecost and he preaches a sermon, citing the scriptures and 3,000 people are converted in a day. And he basically is able to take his listeners to the Old Testament prophets and show that Jesus is the Messiah. Now the people he was speaking to were Jewish proselytes. People from all over the known world, they weren't actually largely believing Jews. They were actually people who had come up for the feast from various parts of the empire. Some would have been believing Jews but there would have been various Godfearers proselytes to jiu-diism as it was then. And they were hearing the gospel in their own language. We know the miracle of the story of the day of Pentecost. And it's remarkable that Peter has this tremendous success but is interesting to notice the audience he's speaking to. He's speaking to a biblically literate audience so he's able to cite the prophet Joel. He's able to take them to the scriptures. He's able to walk them through how, look, Jesus is the Messiah. And in other words, if you're dealing with that scale of sort of one to ten, the people he's speaking to in terms of world and life, you framework, you know, even expectation of the Messiah, they're at like eight. Well, fast forward 15 chapters to Acts chapter 17 and Peter is now not a Paul is now speaking, not like Peter to Jewish proselytes but he's now speaking to pagan philosophers, Epicurean and stoic philosophers who won't get into Epicureanism and stoicism but not that unlike modern naturalistic thinkers, evolutionists, people who believe in physicalism and so on. And he is given this opportunity to speak to them and a number of the key figures from that the intellectual community there do believe it's some of the leading figures within the Ariopagot. It's not thousands. And it's often said, you know, Paul's approach is often critiqued. And by those who say, well, look, Peter had it right because three thousand are converted in one day here and with it when he goes he's going to the prophet, he's showing from the scripture whereas Paul, he talks about basically a biblical worldview. He doesn't cite any particular passage of scripture. He works through a scriptural worldview. He culminates in the resurrection and he gets through the responses, some scoff, some so they want to hear you again about this and some believe. And actually, Paul is incredibly successful, just as successful as Peter, some of the leading people on the council become followers of Christ. That was like having Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, Yale come together for a faculty meeting and Paul speaks to them and many of the key ones come to faith in Christ. But the difference in terms of numbers, fundamentally, of course, has to do with in the end God's sovereign action. But the different type of audience he was speaking to, the biblical literacy of the first group, the worldview that was shared in common. And then the worldview that Paul had Paul had to paint in Acts 17 in order for his listeners to be actually better grasp or he was talking about. And so what I did, what you were talking about, the fundraiser, I just happened to mention that when I started in Christian apologetics, getting on for, gosh, getting on for 30 years now, how am I that old? 30 years ago, that we were concerned as Christian apologists with marshalling evidence for the resurrection or for the authenticity of the New Testament text, or for demonstrations about the historicity of Christ. And because we were largely dealing with 30 years ago with questions that arose from a Biblically Literate audience, they might have questions about the Trinity. They would have challenges about the synoptic gospels and differences and so on. And then of course, you had the questions on the existence of God and suffering and so you prepared to answer those types of questions. But actually, I noticed over time that the questions began to significantly change. And this is why at Ezra, we talk about worldview apologetics or cultural apologetics, which is what we might think of as a civilizational apologetics. So a 30-second whistle stop tour is that at the beginning of Christian apologetics take Augustine's city of God, he offers very much a worldview apologetic that civilization or that starts with the falleness of the angels and goes right through to the eternal city. Because the challenge to him had been Christians were saying, look, Rome is crumbling and people are saying that it's because the Roman people are leaving the gods and they're adopting Christianity and the gods are angry and so Rome is falling. So what are we going to do? What are we going to say? And Augustine basically says, look, all these gods are already defeated gods. They were defeated gods when Rome adopted them and he gives a civilizational picture of the Christian faith. Over time as the West became Christianized, we started to focus in basically on subsets of church dogmatics. It became people kind of you assumed a broadly Christian audience, but people might have specific challenges here and doubts here and there, issues with the Christian claims here and there. And so they'd want evidence of this or proofs of that and so on. That's what a kind of rationalistic apologetic primarily prepared to do. It's not that there weren't people who've always denied the existence of God, but they weren't taken that seriously. And you had rationalistic apologetic arguments that go right back to our historical that were adopted by some of the Christian philosophers, the cause arguments from causation and ontological arguments of that to slightly better one. Maybe we should do an episode one day on some of these arguments, teleological arguments and so on. But the focus tended to be more evidences and there is a place for the use of evidence. We have to use it properly. There's certainly a place for it, but we need to make sure we're using it in terms of a scriptural world and life view. But the challenges became really the right of Christianity to be present in a culture at all. Not questions about the nature of the Trinity or the history of the resurrection, but your homophobic, your colonialist, your imperialist, your anti-choice, your anti-freedom. And they became cultural and civilizational challenges. The challenging the Christian view of politics, the Christian view of law, challenging the Christian idea of the family, the Christian idea of identity. It was more of a root and branch challenge. And often the people challenging you didn't know that there were two testaments in the Bible. Never mind. They didn't have enough knowledge of Christianity to ask a question about the Trinity. They didn't know who Moses was. So the biblical illiteracy meant that we've shifted from an axe to environment where we were 30 years ago, probably really, for right through until about the mid 90s to the early 2000s to now an axe 17 situation in Western culture. And so with Ezra, what we did was we said, well, we need to return to that civilizational apologetic of Augustine. We need to recover a scriptural world and life for you for every single area of life. We need to equip Christians to think Christianly again because it's not this, oh, what's your top five? You know, typically the way it's addressed is top five questions today. Here's five quick answers that you can give. We needed actually a root and branch recovery of a biblical world and life view so that people could develop, could answer again these fundamental questions from a Christian standpoint for themselves. We need to rebuild the biblical world and life view. And so that's really what Ezra has been about. That cultural apologetic is a civilizational apologetic, which means we're not just answering the question, as Michael said, you know, does God exist? And you know, what about evil and suffering and so on? We're actually dealing with questions as fundamental as what is a human being? What is human identity? What is the Christian view of law? Is there a Christian view of marriage, of social order, as well as how do we address suffering? How do we deal with other religions? And why should we trust the New Testament? These are still important questions. But we've had to really go back there because of this collapse of a shared framework. And that really is what's made the Christian dialogue in our culture more challenging today is that the common discourse that was rooted in a Christian kind of vanished. Because your shared worldview allows you that to have a common discourse without it descending into sort of tribalistic shouting at one another, which is what has largely happened now. You know, you show up at university debates very rarely happen any more. Because they don't want them. This is supposed to be a safe space. How can you bring this terrible evangelical homophob and imperialist and anti choice person into this safe space of the university? They don't want the debates there anymore because the the basis for that common discourse has broken down. That's why we need to recover it among Christians so that we can recover it in the culture. Yeah, that's really good. And I think, you know, some of our listeners might be, you know, have been discouraged at one point or another because they kind of load up in their Christian apologetics. They're ready for somebody to ask them about the Trinity. They're ready for somebody to ask them about, you know, the seemingly discontinuity between Scripture. They're ready for somebody to ask them, you know, if God is good, then why is bad? Why do evil things happen to good people? And they're ready for those things. And then they can't even, you know, you can't even answer the question of why does a good God allow evil in the world if you can't agree that there is a standard for right and for wrong that evil actually exists, that that morality is not subjective, right? We used to agree on these outside standards and now we don't, everything has become subjective. So you become sort of put in a hot seat from the emotional whims of the individual that you're with who will call you, you know, white supremacist and a, you know, a colonialist and a, you know, bigot and all those kinds of things. So we know what some of the, what some of the secular assumptions are that have seeped into the church, right? Whether we've talked before on the show about cultural Marxism and about feminism and about, you know, a lot of the anti-West sentiments that coming out of the French Revolution, we know materialism is a big one as well. So a lot of these things have seeped into the church, but my question, Mike, is, you know, why have some of those secular assumptions been absorbed so quickly into the minds of our churches? Yeah, and before we move on from this topic, Nate, I want you to join me on this journey a little bit because this is something where you and I have pastorally observed quite a bit. I think there are a few answers to this question. And if you just look through what Jesus says to the churches, to the seven churches in the book of Revelation, you can just skim through how there is a divided mind there. You know, Jesus says, you know, you do this and yet I have this against you. You know, if you, if you think of, right there at emphasis, you know, this is what I will have against you. You've forsaken your first love. If you go to Pergamum, nevertheless, I have a few things against you. You have people who told to the teaching of Baleum, Thyratira. Nevertheless, I have this against you. You tolerate. So there's this, there's this affection for Christ. And I think that many people in the West and the churches, as we've been blessed by the Lord, unfortunately, the way that when peace comes and what we get comfortable, there is this loss of our first love. You know, I think experientially, many of us can look back to times in our life where our lives were the, we were experiencing the most amount of difficulty. And it was in those times that we looked most clearly to the Lord because we saw our weakness, but when we get lulled into times of comfort and wealth and prosperity, then an individual in a nation can just become self-reliant and self-idolatrous. And so there's this loss of the love of Christ. And I think that's an actual problem when, when, when allegiance to Christ starts costing you in a way that, you know, I'm not going to get that promotion or I'm not going to be able to make that particular income or I'm going to have to give up that experience. Comfort and luxury can just fall right into or can can cause us or tempt us to just lose our love of Christ. And then the second area there is just tolerating bad teaching. And of course, that's coming out of the enlightenment, that's coming out of the academic circles. But the church has been doing a significant amount of just tolerating unfaithful preaching and, and unbiblical teaching. And very specifically, Nate, I'll throw it back to you on this one before you go to Joe to finish off this section. We've just seen all as pastors, Joe, you've experienced this too. We've just seen pragmatism just be the pastoral church growth plan pragmatism just the ends justify the means. And so we see categorically and actually, Joe, Joe started with the, the Peter scenario and the Paul scenario Nate jump in on this when we saw the secret sensitive movement, we seemed to be in a Peter scenario where we got all of these Christians out in society who just seemed to be bored with church. So we create some type of secret sensitive movement to attract them back in. But now culture in the last 20 years has shifted so significantly no longer like a pagan who a pagan who is living happily in their rebellion. Do you think they care whether or not like they have Apple I took they have Apple music. They can listen to any music they want. They don't really need you to be committed to contemporary music on church on Sunday now to tease them like it's a total different environment. And that pragmatism has led us to not having biblical answers. So then when the world comes with more academic claims, then that seeps into the church further. Yeah, that's yeah, I think you're right. And I think that the, you know, a lot of this kind of comes back to as well. What is the goal of Christian apologetics and what is the goal of the gospel? And I think that one of the reasons that pragmatism so gripped the church like you're talking about Michael is because we view the goal of salvation as our ticket to heaven, right? We view the goal here is just to get somebody in and make them a commit and have them make a commitment. And I think that we would all say and I think this is what Ezra is most passionate about is that when God truly transforms a person that person becomes a transforming agent in the world around them. So I think that pragmatism comes from just if we just get them in the doors, if we just get them to pray this prayer and make this commitment, then we've done our evangelistic duty. And the goal of apologetics, the goal of the gospel, the goal of evangelism hasn't been cultural transformation. And so, you know, Joe, I want to kind of give you a chance to talk on this because I know this is an area of passion for you. But when we treat Christianity as sort of a private spiritual compartment in our lives rather than the all-encompassing way of viewing all of life, you know, we can get trapped in this. So talk a little bit, I guess, about that idea. I remember in a debate that you once had, I thought it was a wonderful quip when somebody was talking about your over-realized eschatology and you talked about their under-realized soteriology, right? Just this idea that the Christian life isn't about making disciples is not about getting somebody to pray a prayer after you. Making disciples is about creating transformed individuals who see the world around them as in need of transformation. Yeah, I think the most, the first thing to say that's perhaps most important is that in the end we can't convert anybody. So the pragmatism that you guys have talked about is utterly misguided. Then the goal of apologetics, the fundamental task of apologetics is not to convert people. The fundamental task of apologetics first and foremost is to glorify God. And then it's, as Paul says, that every mouth may be stopped. And the whole world recognizes accountability before God. So if we, one of the reasons pragmatism emerges is because if we think that actually our primary task is to convert people so that we get this outcome of they pray a prayer and make a commitment. And then we're not seeing many commitments at a given time. We start thinking as Michael said, well, maybe this message is not very popular. The temptation is they're well in order to get the outcome. If the goal is getting people's buy-in, then we would think that actually whatever we can do to get people to buy in, that's good. And that's resulted in the watering down of the gospel. We don't really hear about the kingdom of God anymore. We don't hear about the wrath and the judgment of God. We don't hear clear, clear preaching about sin. We don't hear direct challenges to the culture to idolatry. In fact, I was just having a cup of tea with my folks today here in our home talking about the trip I've just been on. And we were talking about how we never hear Islam being challenged in the pulpit and so on. Which is a set would be central to the task of apologetics, but because we don't think it'll be go over well, he won't be very popular, where it might put people off. You can see how the pragmatism actually starts to drive a dysfunctional misdirected apologetic. Because we've got the goal wrong. The goal is to honor Christ, to glorify God, and that every mouse should be stopped, the whole world recognize its accountability to God. We tear down men's hiding places. And that may mean that we have to preach our church empty before it ever is preached full, just like Charles Simian in Cambridge, here in England, a century ago, preached his church empty before it was filled. But we're not willing to pay that price today for the most part. It's not across the board, but for the most part, we're not willing to pay that price. And that has meant that the teeth of the witness of the church have been pulled. And we're not commending ourselves to people's consciences. So Paul was not concerned in act 17 about how successful it was going to be. He was concerned about being faithful. If we get back to that, we'll be effective in apologetics again. Absolutely. So to kind of wrap up this segment with a little bit of application for our listeners, what we kind of want to say succinctly is that the church does not merely need smarter answers, or more polished apologetics, or more polished apologists. It needs renewed minds. And Romans 12 tells us that we are transformed by the renewal of our minds. So faithful apologetics today has to be worldview-driven. It has to be cultural. And it has to equip Christians to think, speak, and live scripturally in the decrystionized world in which we find ourselves. This episode of the podcast for Cultural Reformation is brought to you by Ezra Media. From in-depth lectures, conference talks, podcasts, and exclusive content like premium shows and the podcast post show, Ezra Media is the digital home for the Ezra Institutes Teaching and World View Resources, helping Christians think clearly and live faithfully in every area of life. When you sign up for premium plus, you gain access to exclusive content like the Ezra Podcast Post Show, where the guys dive deeper into the topics discussed in the main episode, along with Ezra Press eBooks and even the opportunity to join live recordings. You can sign up today by going to Ezramedia.tv. And if you use the coupon code podcast, you'll save 15% off an annual subscription. That's using coupon code podcast and you'll save 15% off an annual subscription. Now back to the show. If you're just joining us, we've been talking about apologetics. We've been kind of working our way through a lot of the content of Joe's chapter. Think Christianly about apologetics in, think Christianly. And what we want to talk about now is sort of the the apologist as an evangelist. Right? We want to talk about how the whole sphere and arena of apologetics is really about Christ's authority against the idols of our age. So we want to talk about recovering apologetics as evangelism under divine authority exposing the idols of modern culture and calling people to repentance and faith in Christ. So one of the areas I want to start with, Joe, is in our last segment, we talked a little bit about the decrystionization of culture, how our audience, as we go into the world as Peter commands us to, as those who are ready with the defense, we go in and the temptation is because we go into this sphere as we talked about last time, where there's no longer shared worldview, there's no no longer shared presuppositions. How much more important is it for Christians to presuppose the authority of God's word? Yeah, this takes us to the heart of the question really of not just apologetics, but I think the heart of the Christian life. What is the ground of our authority? And it's often significant to ask, isn't it, when we as Christian parents, parenting our children, or as Christian teachers in the school, or as Christian pastors in the church, we don't start in those contexts from doubt of God's word. We don't begin there, right? We don't say, well, you know, the Christian faith may or may not be true kids, the Bible may or may not be true, but let's, you know, let's see where the evidence leads. I don't see that many people might be Joe. Unfortunately, I hope we don't do that with our children. I certainly hope we don't do it in the church because the word of God doesn't come to us like that. God doesn't offer us a cosmological, teleological, evidential, ontological, any kind of argument, right? It is the starting point. When you look at the opening of the gospel of John, this is the light by which all of the lights are seen and understood. In the beginning was the word, the word was with God and the word was God. That's the starting point, right? That's the vanishing point. That's the, yeah, the vanishing point probably is good away putting it's the, it's the point of departure for the Christian. And just as we don't reason two existence but from existence, right? This is one of the ironies too. When we talk about, you know, the whole question of existence, God's existence, man's existence as a unity as a being. When we're thinking and we're reasoning, it's not some abstract idea of thought that's thinking it's human beings. We reason from existence to existence, not the other way around. We don't reason to existence. I don't reason myself into existence. I don't reason God into existence. God is. And that's the starting point of the challenge of Scripture is God is, he's the creator, sustainer, the governor of all things. You try and make sense of reality without him. That's the challenge of the fundamental challenge of Christian apologetics. So just as we wouldn't approach any other aspects of our life as Christians on the basis of systemic doubt, like, you know, Dakar's eventually when he's doing his thought experiment of doubting everything says, you know, well, I think therefore I am. So as a you can reason to existence, no, who is I, Dakar? Who is I? I think therefore I am. You're pretty supposing this unity already who's doing the thinking you reason from not to existence. So just as in our life as Christian lives with our families and in the life of the church and in the Christian school, we are standing on the authority of God's word. We need to do the same in the work of of apologetics and the justification of the defense of the Christian faith. And actually you can see how in some respects the problem of doing it in any other way would mirror the problem we have of this idea of neutrality in other areas of life in the Christian church. You know how we often say, and our Ezra conferences to people. In fact, I said it to folk in Maryville just last week. You know, when we leave the church building, God's intent is not that we, as we walk out the church doors, we are now under a different kind of authority. We're living under a different word in terms of a different law order as though we somehow get to frenic. It's in every area of life that God requires his authority and his word that his Christ to be taken seriously is the starting point of our understanding. Jesus made this crystal clear. If you want to know whether the doctrine is true, fundamentally you have to follow Christ. If you, if you, if you, if it's those who actually genuinely seeking after the Lord will know whether the doctrine is true or not, you know, God is the, if we come to God, the writer of Hebrew says, we must believe that he is and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. So in the same way that we don't want to leave the church and enter into a completely different world governed by a completely different order, we shouldn't think in our defense of the faith that when we leave the, the, the, the pulpit, we leave the church and when we go out, all the Christian family, then we go out into the world, we're now operating in terms of different authority. Now human reason in inverted commas is the final authority and that's how we've got to try and justify the Christian faith. That's like taking on a tennis match with somebody who redraws the lines in their favor gives you the massive box and then gives you a tiny little box on the other side like a match box to serve into. If they say, well, you've got to now justify the faith in terms of our idea. Then obviously, you know, you've got to show how your facts, if my net can catch your fact and if they can't, your facts are gone. No, we have to see that this is a standoff between worldviews. This is a worldview challenge. It's a worldview encounter that's going on and that fundamentally is the word of God in creation, scripture and Christ or the word of man and the thinking of man. And those in the end are the two starting points. That's why it's so crucial that we begin are thinking our starting point. That doesn't mean that every time you have an apologetics discussion, you're sharing the faith, you have to be quoting a Bible verse. It means that the authority upon which we stand, the worldview on which we stand is the scriptures, what the scripture says, the word of God, the worldview that the scripture gives to us, that's our starting point. We don't approach the non-believers saying, well, maybe Jesus, son of God, maybe isn't, maybe scripture's true, maybe isn't, maybe there's a God, maybe there isn't, let's see with a facts lead. As though there are neutral facts out there in the world. There are, they're either created or they're uncreated. If they're created, every fact speaks of God. Yeah. And one of the things I often said to people who are struggling with this concept, because I think the modern evangelical movement has been so swept up in this idea that, you know, that sort of invitational except Christ and bring him into your heart, I think it was Rick Warren who was on some popular thing. He talked about the 30-day challenge, try Jesus for 30 days and see if your life is better, kind of stuff. And I think, you know, I challenge people often, go into the book of Acts and just do a study on how the apostles evangelized. Was it invitational or was it proclamation, right? Did they, did they, did they talk about inviting people to step into their worldview and try it on, or did they just say, Christ is king, he rose from the dead, he gets to tell you what to say. And, now, Mike, Joe just said it with his beautiful British accent, so he didn't sound quite as offensive as he probably was. But what Joe said is probably actually really, really offensive to modern sensitivities, right? Because we live in a culture where people want autonomy. They want to, they want to self-identify, they want to find their own way, they want to follow their heart. So talk a little bit about that offense and why that idea of proclamation and the assumption of the validity of Christ and his kingship is so offensive to people. And is that offense something that we can escape as Christians? Yeah, Joe, do you realize that literally we just had in December 28, 2025, a redrawing of the tennis lines in the battle of the sexes, just like a month ago, where they pitted the top female player and the top male player against each other, but they made her court smaller on her side. And it was in like total advantage to the female. I can't go down, you know, yeah, who who lost terribly. And so I really appreciated that tennis illustration because it is that absurd. That's what's happening when people go out and try to do apologetics in the name of another authority somehow. It's that absurd watching that type of tennis match. Nate, and we go over this all the time. And sometimes I think I'm really sad for people who don't listen to our podcast regularly because we talk about these things so often that it's old hat. And it becomes a part of our vocabulary. It becomes a part of the way that we disciple. The reason why people get offended, Nate, it's right there in the text in first Peter 3, where we were reading, where we're encouraged to keep a clear conscience. Okay, so that answers the question as to whether or not we're just being mean spirited or in, um, ungracious or, um, condemning not from the sense of pointing out sin, but condemning in more of the ferrisseical sense of being self-righteous, you know, oh, oh, that I was not born a tax collector, that type of thing. But right there in the text, keeping a clear conscience so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior, why is it that anyone would speak maliciously about anyone's good behavior? You know, Nate, uh, Nate drives by his neighbor's house, sees a cat in the tree, um, even though cats all deserve to be just shot out of trees, Nate graciously goes over, gets the cat out of the tree, brings the cat down, hands it to the neighbor, and the neighbor, you know, gives him a cuss word and slams the door in his face. You know, Joe is out and there's an American visiting and doesn't know how to make a proper pot of tea. And so Joe and Jenny bring this terrible heathen into their home and the make him a proper pot of Earl Grey tea or Maiden Grey tea depending on the mood. And that person, you know, runs out of the house and proclaims that they're evil. Why would anyone do that? And the answer is simply because when we're evangelizing people, we are attacking the rebelliousness of their heart. That that's why this structure and direction around the conversation of evangelism is so important because as we've pointed out, the structure, our starting point, our foundation is Christ and then the direction is calling people to him, not to any other thing. And so he's our object of our faith. He is the offensive part of this equation. And so no, offense will always be had by those who look at the good behavior, Christians who are gently and respectfully answering and giving an answer for their hope, people will be malicious because they're dealing with the rebellion of their own heart, right? And that's why verse 17 says it is better if it is God's will to suffer for doing good than for doing evil for Christ died for sins once for all the righteousness, the righteous for the unrighteous. So even if we are being the righteous person, ministering to the unrighteous, the response of a rebellious person will be malice and insult and and and attack. And that's hard to live with. But again, it's only because we've kind of fell into this, you know, the customers always write Christianity that we would somehow believe that that's not true. Yeah, that's good. You know, Joe, just to kind of get to the root of what Michael's talking about there, because I think that's I think that that recognizing the offense that you're going to be walking into, recognizing that what evangelism actually is, is confronting the rebellion towards God and somebody's heart is is a key aspect. You have to understand that if you and we've already talked about pragmatism and you said, we can't convert anybody. That's the whole point is that if we could convert somebody, then we could talk about methods and pragmatism, but that's not the way it works. There is rebellion in their heart. And so I want to get to a little bit the the root of what that rebellion is because ultimately when you are evangelizing somebody, this is sort of I think back to, you know, God going to war with the gods of Egypt, right, where he brings the plagues and he very clearly says in Exodus 12 that he's going, you know, he's going to judge the gods of Egypt when we are evangelizing, we're actually confronting the false gods of other people. And so talk a little bit about where that root comes from, thinking of Romans one and the idea that everybody worships something. And if you do not worship the creator, you worship something created. So talk a little bit about how evangelism is actually confronting the false gods that people have erected in their own hearts. Yeah, well, scripture doesn't take the concept of atheism or unbelief seriously. It basically doesn't tell you that there are believers and atheists or believers and unbelievers or non-believers, I should say. It tells us that there are true believers and there are idolaters. Those are the only categories that the scripture recognizes. There are those that believe in the living God and there are those who have a substitute deity, the divine per se that they have put in the place of God. And so a big part of the task of apologetics is to identify the idol. This is what we might call the in worldview apologetics. This is the internal critique that one is doing. First, you identify what the idol is and then you start to do a critique of just to find out what is this idol doing to the image of God in man and to our view of God himself. How what is the divinity concept here and what does that do to the human person because that's what idols always do. They they change the God that there's a divine per se and therefore the image bearer, man, are understanding of human identity is altered. And of course, as we just said in our last segment there, this is offensive. Jesus was very clear, blessed are those who are not offended in me. And the reality is is that as we identify who the living God is, there people will be offended because they are committed to idols, woe to the world because of offenses. Offenses must come. The Jesus said so. And so the the idols, our commitment to idols in the culture mean that we are offended when we are presented with the living God because the living God shatters our idols. It's like you remember when day gone was when when the when the Ark of God thinking was was brought into the the the pagan temple of the Philistines and and and day gone in front of day gone. Yeah. Their false god, day gone was there and every every time they came in in the morning that the the the statue would fall and over and then its hands were broken off and everything. Well, this is this is what happens in the presence of God when you introduce the presence of the living God, the Lord Jesus Christ into the context of idolatry. They fall. And that's why people get aggressive and defensive. And so this biblical understanding which ties in perfectly with our idea of there's no such thing as neutrality. Everybody starts somewhere. Everybody believes in a divine per se that is something that has the place of ultimate authority. The thing that we identify as the root of meaning or the or the explanation for all things and every single world every single person has this concept. It sometimes has to be peeled back, but there is the the concept of what is somehow in contingent that is that which is to say that is it is somehow necessary that is the non-dependent reality on which everything else depends. And it might be they're so narcissistic it might be their own will or their own idea. But typically what happens is people reduce, they take creation as Paul says in Romans 1 you've already alluded to it. Paul says they worship and serve the creature rather than the creator. So what is the creature? Well it's not just the gods of brass and gold and silver or wood. What we might call more primitive forms of idolatry. But the ideas and the philosophies of men these are creatures these are things they're created right they are they are temporal bound within the context of creation and whether it's the various isms materialism, naturalism, physicalism, evolutionism you could go on and on rationalism, romanticism. We can take almost anything some well-created part of God's order and say that I'm going to give my life to this idea or this philosophy or the pursuit of this or the pursuit of that and it takes the place of the living God. It's the divine per se. It's that thing that is the center of meaning, the center of explanation for life and its significance in somebody's world. And if they're really consistent philosophers that the root of all explanations, the thing on which everything else somehow depends and that's actually what idolatry is. And so we have to in apologetics we have to identify the idol and then think about how this idol makes us think about the divine what's the the God concept and then what what that does to the human person because all idolatry in the end is dehumanizing and destructive because we are made in the image of the living God with dignity as God's image bearers and if you alter the God concept then you image something else and that's why you look at every other unbelieving philosophy that dehumanizing we don't value the sanctity of life and of marriage and of the order, the normative structures that God established and we start thinking we can live through our own imagination and remake the world after our own image. And that's the challenge of our time really. Absolutely. And so just to kind of wrap up our conversation here to give our listeners some some concise application of everything that we've talked about. The the offense is inescapable. You will offend because you're confronting the idols of the day and the Christian apologist is first and foremost an evangelist. So our task is not to try to impress the spirit of our age but to proclaim Christ crucified, risen and raining which means we expose the idols of our culture we call all people everywhere to repentance and to believe and faithful apologetics actually means speaking the truth of the kingdom of God with humility, boldness and confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit to bring about God's plans, God's purposes for the world in which we live. Thanks for joining us for this conversation on apologetics. We would just turn your attention to Joe's great work that we are working our way through. Think Christianly you can find that over on Ezra Press and of course if you've been helped by this conversation want to support the ministry then you can head over and subscribe to Ezra Media. Look at all the great stuff that's going on through the ministry and until next time we want to remind you that from him and through him and to him are all things. It Christ be glorified forever on men.